Transmission burst control in a network device

Incoming data units within a network apparatus are temporarily buffered before being released to downstream components of the apparatus, such as a traffic manager or packet processor. A congestion detection component monitors for congestion with respect to particular subsets of the data units, such as data units that arrived over a same port or port group. When a metric, such as overutilization of the one or more buffers, indicates a state of congestion with respect to one of one of these subsets, various actions may be taken with respect to the subset to reduce the risk of complications from the congestion. In an embodiment, contrary to the expectation that a state of congestion would demand accelerating the release of data units from the buffer(s), a burst control mechanism is enabled. In an embodiment, the actions may further include temporarily pausing a lossless data stream and/or disabling features such as cut-through switching.